Jamison gasped. The tendrils all raised their jaundiced heads and turned toward him, poised to strike.
Grammy Rae, her pale skin blending into the white lace, her teeth chattering, spoke again in that mysterious, musical language. The tendrils wavered, wisps of smoke scattered by a surge of wind, then evaporated. The room glowed with a shower of light. Through slitted eyes, Jamison followed the source back to the windows. The sun had cracked the mists, though only partially. Breathless seconds later, the light dimmed, and a tendril of yellow-green smoke slithered into the room.
With it came the whisper of a disembodied voice, a woman’s. “Rachel Foster,” it sang. “Surrender your secrets and all that follows will be painless.”
The voice, thought Jamison, was sweet, like the strawberries Grammy Rae was picking when she collapsed in the garden a week earlier. Only overly so. After it teased your ears and got to bouncing around inside your mind, the cloying taste it unleashed on your tongue turned foul and it sat in your guts, your body begging to expel it. Jamison felt his gorge rise.
“Rachel, lay down your burdens and surrender your pain.”
“No,” Jamison said. His voice emerged in the thickening air with a distant echo, sounding as though it had been spoken by someone else’s lips. “Get away from Grammy Rae!”
He started forward, only to be pulled out of the room by grasping hands. One released its grip once Jamison’s feet were back in the hallway, but only so that it could clamp over his mouth.
“Silence,” Momma whispered. “Don’t you understand? They resent you nearly as much as they seek your Grammy’s powers.”
Gradually, Momma’s fingers relaxed. Jamison wasn’t aware that he’d been holding his breath until the last one he’d taken began to boil in his lungs. “Me?”
“Male-born. First-born. They hate you most of all,” Momma answered, but that was all she said. When Jamison pressed her, she grabbed hold of his shirt collar and marched him down the stairs.
The low, ghostly moan of an unfelt, invisible gust howled around the eaves of the farmhouse. The wind, which didn’t stir leaf or blade, seemed to come at the house from every direction, and nowhere.
Momma sat huddled in the space of wall to the right of the antique sideboard with Kitten clutched protectively beneath her arm. Jamison thought Momma was praying, but the splinters of words he was able to make out didn’t match the movements of her lips.
Jamison buried his eyes in the pattern of wallpaper, a red liberty bell and classic Valley Forge scene print, which must have been something to converse over in 1945 when Grandpa Wally hung it on the living room walls. By 1961, it had taken on a drab and forgotten countenance, like blurry etchings in a sealed tomb that hadn’t seen sunlight in centuries.
Whispers carried on the wind.
“She’s in there. So is the boy.”
After that the winds began to race faster, louder.
Seated on the stairs in spite of his mother’s protests, Jamison glanced up as a shadow darted past the same window whose sill she and Kitten hid beneath. What walked past the pane at about the height of Jamison’s shoulders resembled a pair of high-heeled shoes, the old-fashioned kind Grammy Rae herself had worn in photos of her taken in the 1920s and ‘30s, along with a length of heavy skirt, fabric that reminded Jamison of tapestry, with big amber beads dangling from the hem. He couldn’t be sure, but he ate a lot of carrots from his carrot patch, and Grammy Rae said carrots were excellent for the eyesight, and Jamison swore there were things suspended in those amber drops—insects, tiny amphibians, even little lizards. And some of those things inside were hopping around, trying to get out.
Jamison blinked. Had he imagined the shoes, the amber? A tense moment later, he heard a scuffle on the farmhouse’s outside wall and knew he hadn’t. Momma’s eyes flew open like shades drawn too tightly, and another scrape sliced through the silence. Someone or something was out there, climbing up the shingles.
“Here, here my sistren,” the voice whispered.
Jamison’s stomach, already sour and twisted into knots, lurched under the voice’s cloying melody. Another quiet ripple of shadow teased the corner of his eye. Jamison turned toward the kitchen in time to see a second set of legs glide past the window. These were skeleton-thin, encased in boots laced up to the knee, and protruding from a long, open gown of purest white beaded at the hem with green gemstones. But not emeralds; emeralds were Jamison’s birthstone and he knew their color because every year on his birthday, dating back as far as he could remember, Grammy Rae had taken him digging in the quarry. Up in his room, wrapped in muslin and carefully stored inside an old shoebox, were eleven rough-cut, rich green stones.
For your future, Grammy Rae’s voice sang in his memory, crisp enough to dispel the nauseating whisper gonging around inside his body. No, those stones weren’t the earthy forest-green of emeralds but a sickly chartreuse, like the storm clouds hanging over Foster’s Pond.
Two more hands raked at the side of the house.
“Over here. The sorceress is here!”
The whisper drew Jamison’s gaze to the most distant of the living room windows and the pendulum swing of a lady’s parasol, closed and sharp looking, its point ending in a jagged purple stone. Not quite amethyst, which was Kitten’s birthstone. She, too, owned birthday treasure thanks to Grammy Rae, who knew where to look for gems in the deep woods. The parasol’s was the color of a fresh bruise.
“Climb, sisters,” whispered the voice.
A third set of nails clawed at the shingles, and there was nothing delicate about that noise, which reminded Jamison of bony hands, scratching their way up from the coldest of graves in the gory comic books he read by flashlight under the covers, much to Momma’s dismay.
“Rachel,” the voice, now three, called in unison. “We’re coming up, Rachel.”
Momma sat wide-eyed and unmoving. Kitten, who hadn’t spoken in days, let forth with a piercing scream. And Jamison, still in his stocking feet and oblivious to the danger, raced out of the kitchen door and into the overcast afternoon.
One moment, he was standing on the flagstone path, aware of the warm, smooth slate beneath the fluffy white cotton of his socks and staring up at the terrifying sight: the dense fog cloaking the sky hung in a slow-motion cyclone, directly above the gabled roof. Closer, a trio of women crawled up the house. The one with the skirt of tapestry and big amber beads had blonde ringlets; the woman in the white cloak with the green gemstones, fiery auburn hair that spilled freely across her shoulders. The woman holding the parasol had since opened it and now levitated higher toward Grammy Rae’s front windows. She wore a gown of purple velvet, buttoned stiffly up her neck, and her black hair, split down the middle by a zigzagging lightning bolt just like the Bride of Frankenstein, was pinned in a severe bun. Even so, the woman was a youthful beauty. They all were. Jamison was beguiled.
The next instant, invisible hands yanked Jamison off his feet and dragged him up between the willows, holding him even with the three women who’d come to steal Grammy Rae’s power. And her life. Perfume, sickeningly sweet, infused Jamison’s next gasp for breath.
“The first-born, male-born child,” the auburn-haired beauty hissed.
Except this close to her, she was the opposite of beautiful. The talons of her mottled hands clutched at the window frame. Her face had appeared young and full of life at a distance, but up close, Jamison saw that her eyeballs were sunken and dead, black tumors clinging to the bony hollows of her sockets. Her mouth, parted in a sinister smile, flashed the stumps of rotted teeth. What Jamison had mistaken for chartreuse jewels were in actuality clots of what appeared to be pus. The woman exuded a stink of infection.
Jamison reached toward the rain gutter, but the invisible hands holding him aloft grasped tighter.
“It has come to us, of its own choice, sistren,” whispered the woman in the purple garb.
Jamison saw that her flesh, too, clung tightly to the bone, but like the desiccated hide of an Eg
yptian mummy. The last of the three women, the first Jamison had seen outside the farmhouse’s window, sent his terror to its peak. Woven into her tapestry-like clothing were scenes of human suffering: the Black Death, plague, disease. As he looked, the fine lines of the weave altered right before his eyes, like flip books or the frames of films shown at drive-in movies. The tiny, flitting horrors within the amber gems, he sensed, were the woman’s minions.
“First the male, then the old magician,” she said. A gust of breath, visibly yellow, rippled out of her mouth and drifted toward him.
To breathe that in, Jamison knew, would be to die in the most horrible of ways, and he didn’t want to die.
The tendril floated closer. Jamison turned away from it. The nearest of the willow tree branches tickled his cheek. The willows! He had climbed both of them before, granted not this high up. Willows, with their fragile softwood, weren’t the best trees for boys to climb. But if he could make it into the dense green cave, he might…
The icy hands holding him suspended turned Jamison into the toxic cloud of breath.
“Savor the kill,” the horror in white chimed in, her head cocked at an angle no living person could mimic.
“Yes, how very long we have dreamed of this,” the mummified hag urged, gliding over to him.
But as she levitated beside him, tethered to her parasol, a blast of wind surged up from around the willow trees. A large whip of branches cracked through the stagnant breath, driving it apart and knocking the hag to the ground. The parasol continued to hover for several seconds more, the woman’s hand and a length of bony wrist still attached to it. The other bookending willow lashed out, knocking the remaining two women off the house. Their whispers turned to shrieks.
Grammy Rae’s musical, beautiful voice called out, “Now, Jamison, climb!”
Jamison reached out and grabbed hold of a clutch of willow branches, which then drew back. The invisible fingers released his soles. Jamison shot into the heart of the tree. Soft leaves cushioned the impact.
“No,” hissed a voice from beneath. “Slay the boy, before—”
The hag never completed her incantation. Jamison, now so high above the ground, was even with Grammy Rae’s windows and only the willow leaves, undulating protectively around him, prevented the boy from clearly seeing what happened next as a supernova of golden light poured through the panes. The effulgence then gusted up into the diseased clouds, driving them apart.
The heavens boomed with a cannonade of thunder. Lightning soon followed, three distinct crackles that left ghostly afterimages superimposed over Jamison’s eyelids and smoking black streaks on the ground in front of the house. The cacophony subsided; in its wake, long last, came the rain.
No further whispers carried on the wind, only the faint and comforting scent of roses and almonds, and a trace of lily of the valley.
Jamison inhaled deeply. “Grammy…”
Stray drops of rain reached him through the canopy of willow branches, masking his tears. The clack of the screen door falling back into place drew his gaze toward the house. Momma and Kitten stood on the flagstone path.
“Jamison?” Momma called weakly.
“Up here,” Jamison said, expelling the breath. “I’m okay. Grammy Rae stopped ‘em.”
“Come down from there, Jamison,” Kitten said, the first words she’d spoken in a week.
As Jamison scooted toward the willow tree’s trunk, a lingering glow at Grammy Rae’s windows captured his attention. Sunlight had driven the storm apart and shimmered in the glass.
A picture of Grammy Rae’s beautiful face formed in Jamison’s inner eye, wreathed in a hundred magnificent memories: the stuffed animals she’d made for him in Christmases past; her pumpkin pies and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving; the way she smiled, laughed; how, when she was in the room with you, the world was a good and gentle place; how, when she walked through the meadows, birds sang, butterflies performed acrobatic maneuvers, and flowers blossomed. She was a powerful magician, able to raise life from lifelessness. How then could she be dead?
Jamison peered through the windows to see Grammy Rae had vanished from her room. But he knew she wasn’t really gone, only invisible, like roses in the snow, flowers out of season, and that her love would protect them until she returned.
***
NUMBER ONE ANGEL
by Allison M. Dickson
Initially published on Amazon, January 2013
Mama carried her plate of cake to the living room and plopped down in her ratty old recliner, its broken frame crunching under her weight. Louise always thought one day the woman would fall right through and end up with a piece of splintered wood stuck right up her old fat ass, but none of that mattered now. This was the last time Mama was ever going to sit down anywhere, if everything went like Phelan said it would. And it ought to. Louise had done just like he showed her.
“Now you listen up, Little Louise,” Mama said. “Any man who says he’ll lasso the moon for you is a no-good liar.” She crammed a huge bite of cake into her well-oiled gob, and Louise watched her swallow it nearly whole, like a snake eating a mouse. “Truth is, you ain’t never gonna get a man that’s worth a damn, cause you ain’t no better’n me. And you seen what kinda men I ended up with. Only thing Danny could lasso, God rest his soul, was six-packs of Natty Light and a hundred-fifty a week in unemployment.”
Louise didn’t utter more than a few agreeable grunts here and there. It didn’t matter what she said. Mama never listened. She just liked to do the talking part, and Louise thanked the heavens it wouldn’t have to go on much longer. The woman was vicious most times and downright boring the others, rattling on about how she knew better than anybody about everything, or about her dumb soap operas or some end of the world crap she’d watched on the Discovery Channel. Louise hated those shows. Hated most television, really. The people on it were mean or always trying to scare folks. She only watched it because she wasn’t much good at reading. These days, though, she preferred to spend time with Phelan. He was better than the best TV shows all rolled into one.
Mama took another bite of the birthday cake Louise had cooked up special. Carrot, Mama’s favorite, with a thick spackle-like coating of cream cheese frosting. It was way too much cake for two, but Mama didn’t have any other friends to share it with, and probably would’ve hogged it all up for herself even if she did. The mean old bitch loved her some cake, and probably thought she’d have this one all through the week with every meal. Too bad for her, though, she wouldn’t survive the next few bites.
The piece on Mama’s plate was twice the size of her fist, and she didn’t have dainty lady hands either. Louise never much cared for sweets, herself, but she was especially afraid of this one. Her deadly little sliver was still on its plate, and she had no intention of tasting it. Mama thought it was because she was trying to skinny up for her new man, and the mean old hag ridiculed her mercilessly for it.
“Might as well eat it, girl. Gonna take more than avoiding a little bit of cake to get rid of that gut.” She pointed her fork at Louise’s midsection, which was a slightly less rotund version of her own. “He seen you with the lights on yet? I’m guessin’ he hasn’t if he’s still around.”
Mama never did like Phelan. In fact, she seemed like she was a little afraid of him. But as far as Louise could tell, Mama never liked any man. She drove two husbands to early graves. Louise didn’t understand how the woman ever had laid down with one long enough to get pregnant twice. The thought of Mama having sex was enough to make Louise gag a little.
“He’s seen all of me and loves every inch,” Louise said, bracing herself for the eventual tirade of threats and cuss words. Even with Mama on death’s doorstep, Louise was still terrified of her. What if the poison didn’t work? What if she didn’t add enough to compensate for the woman’s weight? She pushed that thought away. It would work. Of course it would. Phelan wouldn’t have steered her wrong. The only other person in the world who wanted Mama dead, except
Louise and maybe her big brother up in the state pen, was Phelan.
Mama shoveled a few more hunks of cake into her mouth and swallowed them whole. Gulp-gulp-gulp. How the woman could do that and not choke to death, Louise had no idea, but then again Mama didn’t have hardly any of her teeth left.
“Now you listen here, Missy. You think you know all there is to know about that new man of yours, but I got a newsflash for ya. He’s got evil in him. I felt it first time I saw him, just like I felt it in your pa and your brother, and probably even Danny too, though he was really just a drunken idiot. Either way, I know evil when I see it.”
A film of sweat broke out on Mama’s forehead as she spoke. The poison was doing its work, and Louise felt a wave of relief. “Mama, I heard all this before. There ain’t any man alive you don’t think has the devil in him. But you’re wrong this time. Phelan loves me, and you’re just jealous.”
“Ha! Jealous.” Mama wiped off her dripping forehead with a trembling hand, and a little runnel of cloudy drool was dripping from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know how I raised such a dumb bitch for a daughter. But . . . but you’ll see one day he’s just usin’ you. Only thing he c-cares about is wh-where he c-c-can . . . where he can put his…” Mama trailed off as the left side of her face began to twitch. The drool increased and trailed down her bulbous double chin like the path of a slug. The cocktail of herbs and powders Louise had put into the cake, under the strict guidance of her lover, was finally starting to work.
Louise remained as still as a statue, ignoring any urge to help the woman who raised her, for she was also the woman who kicked her and hurt her and put her down every chance she got. She never would have found the courage to free herself if not for Phelan, and now in just a few short moments, it would all be over. Louise could start her life fresh, with the man she loved. She just kept watching, more fascinated than afraid, as Mama started convulsing in big jerks, flabby legs flying out in front of her, eyes all rolled up into her head like in one of those movies where someone got possessed by the devil. The crotch of her billowy sweatpants turned dark with piss, and then bloomed red with blood. A moment later, Louise smelled the unmistakable odor of shit. Her paralysis finally broken, she stumbled back from Mama’s chair, grimacing and moaning with disgust. Phelan hadn’t told her that would happen, that it would be so . . . messy.
Wrapped in Black: Thirteen Tales of Witches and the Occult Page 3
